I once was acquainted with a lady named Roberta Pournelle. She was a professional schoolteacher who specialized in hard-to-teach children and illiterate adults. She claimed that she had never once failed to teach any normal-IQ child, or normal-IQ adult, how to read, and read well.
She believed that, except in extraordinarily rare cases, "dyslexia" was a modern form of pseudoscience, like phrenology. Her belief was that teachers 30 or more years ago recognized dyslexia instantly and correctly: a normal kid (or poorly educated adult) who had some very common difficulties developing the right reading habits. The solution?
The exact same training all people used to get in how to read: phonics. Some just needed a little more time and patience.
That's it. Finito. Phonics, and patience. Nothing fancy, no special tricks, and anyone could do it.
I thought of her when I read this.
Yes, phonics is how you teach reading to dyslexics.
No, dyslexia is not "made up". It doesn't have to be crippling, but it is a real disability, suffered by several members of my immediate family.
Thanks for the link. This is an excellent article. I sent it to a friend who has a bright and active but verbally backward three-year-old son. I fear for what may happen to that kid when he gets into the school system, and I want his parents to think hard about their alternatives.
I just discovered and linked your site a few days ago. It's very well designed. I like those drop-down panels.
So....how many points is it worth on a college application?
Don’t let yourself be bamboozled by the “But many kids don’t understand phonics.” argument, either. I ran into this with one lady who taught at Tucker High School in Dekalb County, GA. She said that she did not understand phonics until she was in college.
I wanted to inform her that was a personal problem; but I did not have the heart to be that cruel, I mean politically incorrect. She was a member of my church singles group. She would have hated me permanently if I did.
The truth is that 83% of children who study phonics “get it.” That means by default that 17% do not. I will take an 83% success rate every single time despite what the NEA or the AFT says.
I want to mention one more thing before I forget. Thomas Sowell wrote in “Inside American Education” that college students in education departments are the worst students nationwide. They regularly have the lowest on ACT and SAT scores in every single department in most every college in America. Martin Gross mirrors this in his opus “Conspiracy of Ignorance.” He actually documents instances of teachers who cannot write grammatically correct sentences. Their idiomatic English is definitely self-styled. These people teach our children in the inner cities. Now you know THE major reason why black kids require racial preferences, quotas and set asides to matriculate at the University of Michigan. Go look at Detroit.
You can thank the NEA, MEA, and AFT for this. They control the entire “education establishment” in Michigan. The latter two also control education establishments across America. They demand that ALL teachers in public schools have teaching degrees in order to teach in public schools. Private schools do not require this. Go figure. Also, why do American colleges and universities not require professors and assistant professors to have teaching degrees to teach at the college level?
This bogus requirement obviously is an ersatz creation of the American education establishment. Education will improve nationwide when we drop this bogus requirement. Martin Gross suggested dropping all EDD’s, the education department’s equivalent of a PHD nationwide. He sites the fact that EDD requirements require that each EDD candidate take one-half as many core classes as a PHD candidate. Forty-five hours of core classes and forty-five hours of “teaching theory” classes are the norm. Every other PHD requires ninety hours of core classes.
The problem with racial preferences is what drives racial preferences: substandard inner city education. No politician will tell you this.
Thomas Sowell wrote in “Inside American Education” that college students in education departments are the worst students nationwide.
I had some good friends who worked for Purdue, and my wife worked for University of Michigan, both with major schools of education. They'll all tell you that Education majors are almost universally looked down on as being not very bright, and often incapable of getting any other degree.
I've met public school teachers who cannot write a decent sentence, and I've seen public school teachers who cannot properly do the math that they are attempting to teach their students.
I have other friends with degrees in Education who will tell you that such degrees are a complete joke and a waste of time--that they teach very little of value and are of little help in the classroom. These are professional classroom teachers, mind you, who will say that.
I have often thought such degree programs should be scrapped, and the requirements for what it takes to be a school teacher completely overhauled.
>>I have often thought such degree programs should be scrapped, and the requirements for what it takes to be a schoolteacher completely overhauled.
Yes it should, beginning with the requirement that all pubic schoolteachers have teaching degrees. Tell that to my egotistical teacher sister. That must be a requirement that the NEA pressured state legislatures as a formal statute. Actually, Dean what we really need is the abolishment of the Department of Education; but we traveled that road before.
You can go to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy to gather a few new ideas. Here it is: http://www.mackinac.org. You can sign up for their Michigan Education newsletter there, too. It's free.
My mother, a former schoolteacher and a strong believer in phonics, taught me to read at home when I was four years old. Using the old McGuffey's Readers! This was back in 1960. When I arrived in kindergarten the next year, I was the only kid in my class who knew how to read-- teaching your kids to read at home "was not done" in those days. When they started teaching our class reading in 1st grade, fortunately they took the phonics approach, reinforcing what I had already learned. In 2nd grade I was reading at a 5th grade level. In 3rd grade, once a congenital visual problem had been corrected by eye surgery, I was reading at an 8th grade level. To this day, I am thankful to my mother and to my teachers in school for using phonics. Kevin, I'd say 83% would be a pretty good guesstimate of the percentage of students in my class who turned out to be good or excellent readers.
I can pretty well tell which kids in my confirmation classes have learned to read by phonics, and which ones have sort of learned to read by the "look-and-guess" approach. (We live at the juncture of three school districts in two different states.) The phonics kids read easily and fluently, with expression and understanding: they hesitate only over the more arcane names out of the Bible, and even there they're usually able to sound it out. Whereas the "look-and-guess" kids-- even at junior high age and even if they're otherwise quite intelligent-- are still stumbling over longer or less common words, and when they run into Nebuchadnezzar, they don't even know where to begin.
"Look-and-guess" might possibly make sense, if you were learning to read a logographic language such as Chinese; though even there (I speak from ignorance) wouldn't one learn to decompose a character into a combination of the 214 radicals? But to my mind, teaching kids to read an alphabetic language like English by the "look-and-guess" approach verges on child abuse.
I met Roberta Pournelle at a party once, and I admit that I mostly started talking with her because she was Jerry Pournelle's wife. After about a minute it was fascinating to chat with her strictly because of who she was, not because of her spouse.
I concur with the statements about education departments. My degree is in Sec Ed/English. While we had some intelligent students in the program, the image that forever lingers is a multimedia class in which the projector began spewing film off the reel while the instructor frantically and ineffectually waved her hands in the air in what appeared to be a failed exorcism attempt. Finally a student reached over and turned off the machine as the rest of the class convulsed in laughter. I still regard that instructor as one of the better ones I had in the education department.
The other major memory relates to the C-BEST test, or California Basic Educational Skills Test, a prerequisite to getting a credential (or at least it was back in 1983). When I went to take the test, I met several prospective teachers who were in for retakes, some having failed it more than once. Questions were along the lines of "If Johnny has a pie cut into five slices and gives a slice to Sally, what percentage of the pie does he have left?" I think anyone who failed the test should not only teach, they should have their degree revoked. I think my 11-year-old son could pass the test, so I shudder to think of those who passed it on the third attempt and then went off to mold the youth of America.
(I know how to spell "mould" and was alluding to the disintegration of organic matter, specifically brain cells. Lame joke, but hey, I have an education degree!)
I thank the gods that my elementary school taught phonics, they managed to beat (figuratively!) the word recognition scaring from the Cat in the Hat out of me!
Oh, and Roberta is still on the Phonics bandwagon, she's been doing reading instruction software for some years now at: http://www.readingtlc.com/
When I eventually have children, I intend to use it to help teach them to read, and no Cat!!
What do we have here, the creation of a new victim class? "Those bad teachers have given my child dyslexia!" Shame on any parent who gives up the raising of his children to a government bureaucracy. I never had the time or maybe the balls to home school my children (yet) but I never abrogated my responsibility either. When my children first attended school, they found that the other children did not know how to read. When my kids come home with a homework assignment that I feel is wrong, I take the time to set things right. I teach my kids to stand up on their own hind legs. If I fail, there will be no one to blame but myself. If they fail, they will have no one to blame but themselves. The teacher's failure will be a personal problem for her to deal with. My son had a fourth grade teacher who only knew Ebonics! He nonetheless got in the top 10 in his school in the FCATs that year. (That's Florida's version of the standard reading test) He certainly didn't learn how to read from her. And she had a, get this, MASTERS degree!.
And it's not just reading. Math teaching leaves a lot to be desired as well. I had to reteach over the detritus of a system that seems to seek mediocrity in the children rather than than the excellence that I demand from my children. And they seem to expect from themselves.
When the teacher wanted me to "consider" getting amphetamines for my oldest son, I realized that this was just a way to create a drug-induced docility in a child who was, after all, just like his Dad. And I acted out just like my father reportedly did. but there is an alternative to drugs... it is called discipline. And Dad and I did just fine.
Well, the phonics people are trying to ABOLISH dyslexia as a victim class, and teach kids to read!
Phonics is all about empowerment of the student. A properly instructed phonics student should be able to spell antidisestablishmentarianism the first time he sees it. Don't get excited, David, I'm on your side!
Poor teaching does not cause dyslexia, it reveals dyslexia. Dyslexia is a physical condition, a learning disability.
Phonics can usually teach a dyslexic how to read, but the condition will always affect the sufferer, even after they have learned phonics.